In addition to playing video baseball (I am twenty games ahead of my division), one of the projects I have been engaged in during my current unemployment is reading some of the books that I was supposed to have read during college that I either skimmed or did not read at all. One of the books that I have been reading (I mean rereading) is de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
In the second chapter de Tocqueville talks about the origin of the character of nations, and how like people, what affects them in their youth generates the form that they will take. He writes:
"If we are able to go back to the elements of states and to examine the oldest monuments of their history, I doubt not that we should discover in them the primal cause of the prejudices, the habits, the ruling passions, and in short, all that constitutes what is called the national character."
In the chapter he goes on to talk about how American democracy arose in the New England colonies. First it arose on the town level were the settlers elected their own officials, made their own laws, and levied their own taxes. Local democracy arose from the fact that in the New England colonies the settlers had left the landed aristocracy behind in England and needed to run things for themselves. While some of the laws that were written would not pass muster today (they were not always big on religious freedom) the fact that they were writing their own laws and electing officials for themselves prepared them to grow into a democratic nation.
This has made me wonder about what our country has been trying to do in the Mideast. At first I was in favor of American troops in Afghanistan. The Taliban were bad news and ousting them after 9/11 was necessary in my opinion. It was under the Taliban government where those that hatched the plot on 9/11 were allowed safe haven. But is our project in Afghanistan doomed because there are not "monuments" of democracy in it’s past?
I don’t know, but the history of the region doesn’t make me hopeful about our chances for success.